Monthly Archives: December 2014

3:22

It’s about time that I talk about Time
And its kaleidoscopic quality.
For one, I know I should, while in my prime,
Live life with purpose (less frivolity).
A pain can worsen by the second’s tick,
Yet wounds are healed as years and days go by.
I love when I have time to choose and pick
To plan, to think, to practice and to try.
I like to strike with excellence and speed,
But hate to rush and skip and compromise.
It happens often still, which means I need
To be a friend of Time’s and optimize
My schedule to my wants and needs somehow.
To live my life, at best, the time is now!

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel.

I was cleaning out old boxes at home and saw my notes from when I just graduated from college and began preparing for my job search. Seeing them reminded me of how I went through countless iterations of résumé layout designs. Since many of my school assignments were to redesign logos, websites, and other works, I naturally thought I needed to do the same with résumés. I know now that it was excessive; of all the places I should exhibit my design sensibilities and talent, the résumé was hardly the first.

With the portfolio, however, I had more freedom to express myself, though that may be a challenge as well. Ever since I was young, I learned to code web pages from scratch. Using the same approach, I tried to build my web site and portfolio by hand-coding everything so I could also display my skills outside of visual design. I created many custom one-off functions and scripts even though there were better versions out there. In the end, I realized that the necessary code was more complex than I could handle, so I had to leverage the existing web-building platforms out there to take care of the back-end and allow myself to focus on the visual portion of the site.

Now with a few years into my career, I’ve learned that the best solutions to tasks like these should have a balance between being effective and being efficient. As a UX designer in a gaming company, I always try to approach problems by critically looking at the fundamental issue and work my way up to a low-cost, high-reward solution. Sometimes, that may be seem excessive for the more minor problems, where the best solution may just be the obvious one. But this approach more accurately determines whether I need to come up with an innovative solution, or if I could use existing, proven work and save time from reinventing the wheel.

Exactly two months ago, I began an amazing and incredible 45-day trip around the world. While no photo, video, or any other medium comes close to actually being there, here is my attempt to briefly describe in five minutes my Little Big Trip.